mpg123 does not support large files

[Arun Bhalla]

Binary package hint: mpg123-esd

I was saving a MP3 stream to WAV file, and mpg123 (which is actually symlinked to mpg123-esd on my system) died when the output file hit 2GB in size. It appears that mpg123-esd needs to be recompiled with largefile support. Largefile support should be enabled for all programs.

system:bhalla<mp3>370: mpg123 -w poodles.wav -@ http://10.0.0.251:9100/listen.m3u
High Performance MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 Audio Player for Layers 1, 2 and 3
        version 0.60; written and copyright by Michael Hipp and others
        free software (LGPL/GPL) without any warranty but with best wishes

Directory: http://10.0.0.251:9100/
Playing MPEG stream 1 of 1: listen ...
Note: Junk at the beginning (0x024a09a3)
MPEG 1.0 layer III, 64 kbits/s, 44100 Hz joint-stereo
 zsh: file size limit exceeded (core dumped) mpg123 -w poodles.wav -@ http://10.0.0.251:9100/listen.m3u

system:bhalla<mp3>384: ls -alt /opt/mp3/poodles.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 bhalla users 2147483647 Apr 10 18:41 /opt/mp3/poodles.wav

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Confirmed in 8.04.1 and 8.10 beta. See src/libmpg123/reader.h:55.

[Thomas Orgis (thomas-forum)]

Note that mpg123 supports large files since quite some time now... I just verified that it also writes a WAV file > 4G. But there is still a catch: It doesn't change the WAV format it uses... so for sizes >4G, the header information will be wrong, since the WAV header only has 4 bytes for the size field.

You could still have software that works around this, but it might be an idea to add support for WAV64 or another container format. In any case, you can always generate raw audio files of any size via the -s switch (possibly piping towards another program that wraps it into a container).